As the Patriots keep kicking over rocks and sifting through the NFL junk drawer for wide receiver help, former Patriot Brandin Cooks is putting up numbers for the Los Angeles Rams. After catching seven passes for 159 yards on Sunday against Arizona, he’s got 12 catches for 259 yards in his first two games.
Meanwhile, Phillip Dorsett, Chris Hogan and Cordarelle Patterson have 187 yards between them. So far, the plays designed for Patterson have generally originated at or behind the line of scrimmage. His size and speed alone should make him a potent outside threat but the Patriots aren’t showing much faith in his ability to bring them what they gave up when Cooks was dealt.
Even if Cooks was crapping the bed in L.A., that wouldn't change the fact the Patriots miss him desperately both for the production he could give and the impact he'd have on opposing defenses.
And when you reflect on it, the foresight the Patriots demonstrated in dealing Cooks would have been better applied when they traded Jimmy Garoppolo. Instead, they minimized the return they got on a player who wasn't going to help them worth a damn in 2018 and maximized the return on a player who'd be helping them greatly right now.
In a vacuum, dealing Cooks was savvy. The Patriots got back a first-round pick (No. 23, spent on offensive lineman Isaiah Wynn) and a sixth-round pick.
After a productive 2017 season, they got back from the Rams more than they paid when they traded for Cooks in 2017 (the 32nd overall pick) and -- if the team had no plans to re-sign Cooks long term -- it was forward thinking to maximize the return.
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You have to figure there was urgency to deal Cooks before the draft so the Pats would have more draft-day ammo.
New England Patriots
And this is where it’s important to take the view from 30,000 feet. The Patriots would have had all the draft-day ammo they needed last April if they auctioned off Jimmy Garoppolo instead of dropping him on the Niners doorstep for just a second-round pick.
I was told that part of the reason the Patriots kept Garoppolo as long as they did was as insurance. If Tom Brady came back in 2017 and fell off the much-discussed cliff or got injured, Garoppolo would still be around to carry a Super Bowl-worthy team as far as he could.
Why didn’t it work that way with Cooks?
If the Patriots had gotten more for Garoppolo, that would have removed the urgency of moving on from Cooks before the draft.
Then the team could have taken its time and determined whether Kenny Britt, Jordan Matthews, Malcolm Mitchell or Patterson could adequately replace Cooks’ production. If they kept Cooks into the summer, they still would have found a taker out there so they got something in return. And if they didn’t and got nothing because they weren’t going to sign Cooks long-term to big money, c’est la vie. At least they hit the mother lode on Jimmy.
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Instead, they moved on from a competent, outside-the-numbers threat. They didn’t import a suitable replacement. They learned their best wideout -- Julian Edelman -- would be down for the first month of the season. And they are now signing and using roster spots on players like Corey Coleman, a player the Bills cut after three weeks even though it cost them a $3.55 million cap hit and a seventh-round pick.
Even more mind-blowing to me is the fact that they didn’t just trade Cooks, they were calling around the league to select teams in an effort to trade Rob Gronkowski as well.
When you watch a game like Sunday’s against a team with a really good defense that’s devoting two players to covering Gronk on third downs, you can’t help but think to yourself how bad it would look if Gronk wasn’t out there.
Or if Tom Brady wasn’t and it was Jimmy Garoppolo trying to stand in there and solve the Jaguars defense with the surrounding cast of offensive players.
The Patriots will get their wins. Brady and Josh McDaniels will figure it out. But it didn’t have to be this hard. “Doing what’s best for the football team” is a phrase that can be interpreted a lot of different ways.
The value loss they incurred by not maximizing Garoppolo’s value indirectly led to them trying to maximize the return they could get on Cooks. Now they have neither a high-upside backup quarterback nor a downfield receiver with the ability of Cooks. You have to squint really hard to try and see how those moves wound up being what was best for the 2018 Patriots.